During the development of the recently released Heroku SSL feature, a lot of work was carried out to stabilize the system and improve its speed. In this post, I will explain how we managed to improve the speed of our TLS handshakes by 4-5x.

The initial reports of speed issues were sent our way by beta customers who were unhappy about the low level of performance. This was understandable since, after all, we were not greenfielding a solution for which nothing existed, but actively trying to provide an alternative to the SSL Endpoint add-on, which is provided by a dedicated team working on elastic load balancers at AWS. At the same time, another of the worries we had was to figure out how...

Today we are announcing the newest version of the Heroku CLI. We know how much time you spend in the CLI as developers and how much pride you take in being able to get things done quickly. Our new CLI has big improvements in performance as well as enhanced readability for humans and machines.

Tuned for Performance

CLI response time is made up of two parts: the API response time and the performance of the CLI itself, and the latter is where we’ve made big improvements. While a typical Unix user should experience responses that are around half a second faster, the biggest gains are for Windows users, as the new CLI no longer has a Ruby wrapper.

When we measured the time it takes for the...

Postgres is our favorite database—it’s reliable, powerful and secure. Here are a few essential tips learned from building, and helping our customers build, apps around Postgres. These tips will help ensure you get the most out of Postgres, whether you’re running it on your own box or using the Heroku Postgres add-on.

Use a Connection Pooler

Postgres connections are not free, as each established connection has a cost. By using a connection pooler, you’ll reduce the number of connections you use and reduce your overhead.

Most Postgres client libraries include a built-in connection pooler; make sure you’re using it.

You might also consider using our pgbouncer buildpack if your application...

PostgreSQL 9.6 is now generally available for Heroku Postgres. The main focus of this release is centered around performance. PostgreSQL 9.6 includes enhanced parallelism for key capabilities that sets the stage for significant performance improvements for a variety of analytic and transactional workloads.

With 9.6, certain actions, like individual queries, can be split up into multiple parts and performed in parallel. This means that everything from running queries, creating indexes, and sorting have major improvements that should allow a number of different workloads to execute faster than they had in prior releases of PostgreSQL. With 9.6, the PostgreSQL community, along with Heroku’s...

Heroku recently released [a managed Apache Kafka][1] offering. As a Node.js developer, I wanted to demystify Kafka by sharing a simple yet practical use case with the many Node.js developers who are curious how this technology might be useful. At Heroku we use Kafka internally for a number of uses including data pipelines. I thought that would be a good place to start.

When it comes to actual examples, Java and Scala get all the love in the Kafka world. Of course, these are powerful languages, but I wanted to explore Kafka from the perspective of Node.js. While there are no technical limitations to using Node.js with Kafka, I was unable to find many examples of their use together in...